Friday, December 23, 2011

SOPA or the Stop Online Piracy Act is dead for the holidays this year, but expect it to be brought back in January. If you haven't heard of this bill, listen up!! This is like DMCA 2.0 - more advanced and ready to kill your internet experience. Ostensibly it is designed to make it harder for people to steal movies and music off the internet, but in reality it goes so far that it will allow media conglomerates to say "oh, that website is infringing our stuff, please kill it," and the site can be taken down without a hearing in a court or any kind of notice. This would threaten even well-established sites like YouTube while at the same time would lead to the quiet deaths of thousands of smaller lesser-known websites that a media company may have thought might have been infringing some part of one of their copyrights. This kind of internet censorship needs to be stopped. If you are an American, call your congressperson today to tell them to vote against SOPA if it comes before them.